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A brief phenomenology of perception - Magical Realist - Apr 26, 2026
Perception is not possible without sentience AND thought. Merely seeing without thinking about it grasps nothing beyond its field of vision. Merely thinking about something without seeing it grasps the reality of something but without its phenomenal presence to us. To really perceive something as real in front of us we have to both see it and think it at the same time.
But since our attention is inherently indivisible, it can't attend to what is seen and what is thought at the same time. That's why when you are just looking at something, you're just watching it, and are incapable of thinking. It's also why when you are thinking about something, you are no longer watching it, essentially blinded to what your eyes are looking at.
To solve this problem, we have to, unnoticeably to ourselves, go back and forth between or iterate thoughtless seeing and sightless thought, alternating these two phenomenally-opposite manifestations of the real into one seemingly coherent state called perception.
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"Iteration means repeating a process to generate a (possibly unbounded) sequence of outcomes. Each repetition of the process is a single iteration, and the outcome of each iteration is the starting point of the next iteration.
In mathematics and computer science, iteration (along with the related technique of recursion) is a standard element of algorithms."----- Wikipedia